Fifteen Killed, 60 Injured in Polish Train Crash
Rescue workers toiled overnight to pull survivors from the wreckage of a head-on train crash in southern Poland as the death toll rose to 15 on Sunday, in one of the country's worst rail disasters.
"We know that 15 people are dead. Unfortunately we have not yet been able to remove the body of the last victim. We can see it but not get to it," Pawel Fratczak, a spokesman for the emergency services in Szczekociny told AFP
"I can say the stage of the operation to evacuate the injured is now over," he added.
"We have sent in six sniffer dogs specially trained to locate survivors and bodies. They did not indicate anything. But we will not be 100 percent sure until we have cleared away the wreckage."
Emergency services were preparing Sunday to remove the mangled engines and carriages from the track.
"This is the worst catastrophe in years," Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk told reporters when he arrived on the scene late Saturday.
Sixty people were hospitalized with about half reported to be in a serious condition, rescuers said.
Ukrainian nationals were reported to be among the injured, while French and Spanish citizens were also on the trains but apparently not injured in the crash.
A total of 350 passengers were on board the two trains which collided head-on at 9:00 pm (2000 GMT) Saturday as they were travelling on the same track, according to Poland's PKP railways.
One train was en route to the southern city of Krakow from the capital Warsaw, while the other was bound for the capital from the south-eastern city of Przemysl.
Investigators gave no early indications as to what caused the crash, which happened on a stretch of the line which had recently been modernized, according to Transport Minister Slawomir Nowak.
Images of the wreckage broadcast by the TVN24 commercial news channel showed tons of mangled metal, with reports indicating that three carriages had jumped the tracks along with the locomotives from both trains.
"We heard a deafening noise and we were hurled out of our seats," an unnamed survivor told the PAP Polish news agency. "We saw crushed bodies pinned beneath seats and we saw parts of bodies inside and outside the train wagons," the survivor said.
"It was terrifying. The scale of destruction is huge," one of the first firemen on the scene told the PAP.
Another survivor told the TVN24 news channel of dead bodies as well as people still alive but pinned down under twisted metal.
Fireman Grzegorz Widawski described the conditions at the crash site as "very challenging."
"The wagons are in very bad shape and it's difficult to get to the people trapped inside," he told the PAP.
Some 450 firefighters and 100 policemen were involved in the rescue operation, emergency response authorities said.
Saturday's accident was the worst rail catastrophe in Poland since 1990, when 16 people were killed in a collision between two trains in the Warsaw suburb of Ursus.
The country's worst train accident was in 1980 in Otoczyn, near the northern city of Torun, when 67 people died and 62 were injured in a collision between a passenger and a freight train.
Source: Agence France Presse
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